Blue Genes. Val McDermid

do,’ I reminded her.

      Alexis lifted her eyes and gazed into mine. ‘This has got to stay between us,’ she said, her voice a plea I’d never heard from her before. ‘I mean it, KB. Nobody gets to hear this one. Not Della, not Ruth, not even Richard. Nobody.’

      ‘That serious, eh?’ I said, trying to lighten the oppressiveness of the atmosphere.

      ‘Yeah, that serious,’ Alexis said, not noticeably lightened.

      ‘You know you can trust me.’

      ‘That’s why I’m here,’ she admitted after a pause. The hand that wasn’t hanging on to the cigarette swept through her hair again. ‘I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be to tell you.’

      I leaned back against the sofa, trying to look as relaxed and unshockable as I could. ‘Alexis, I’m bombproof. Whatever it is, I’ve heard it before. Or something very like it.’

      Her mouth twisted in a strange, inward smile. ‘Not like this, KB, I promise you. This is one hundred per cent one-off.’ Alexis sat up straight, squaring her shoulders. I saw she’d made the decision to reveal what was eating her. ‘This baby that Chris is carrying—it’s ours.’ She looked expectantly at me.

      I didn’t want to believe what I was afraid she was trying to tell me. So I smiled and said, ‘Hey, that’s a really healthy attitude, acting like you’ve really got a stake in it.’

      ‘I’m not talking attitude, KB. I’m talking reality.’ She sighed. ‘I’m talking making a baby from two women.’

      The trouble with modern life is that there isn’t any etiquette any more. Things change so much and so fast that even if Emily Post were still around, she wouldn’t be able to devise a set of protocols that stay abreast of tortured human relationships. If Alexis had dropped her bombshell in my mother’s day, I could have said, ‘That’s nice, dear. Now, do you like your milk in first?’ In my Granny Brannigan’s day, I could have crossed myself vigorously and sent for the priest. But in the face of the encroaching millennium, all I could do was gape and say, ‘What?’

      ‘I’m not making this up, you know,’ Alexis said defensively. ‘It’s possible. It’s not even very difficult. It’s just very illegal.’

      ‘I’m having a bit of trouble with this,’ I stammered. ‘How do you mean, it’s possible? Are we talking cloning here, or what?’

      ‘Nothing so high tech. Look, all you need to make a baby are a womb, an egg and something to fertilize it with.’

      ‘Which traditionally has been sperm,’ I remarked drily.

      ‘Which traditionally has been sperm,’ Alexis agreed. ‘But all you actually need is a collision of chromosomes. You get one from each side of the exchange. Women have two X chromosomes and men have an X and a Y. With me so far?’

      ‘I might not have A level biology, but I do know the basics,’ I said.

      ‘Right. So you’ll know that if it’s the man’s Y chromosome that links up with the woman’s X chromosome, you get a little baby boy. And if it’s his X chromosome that does the business, you get a girl. So everybody knew that you could make babies out of two X chromosomes. Only they didn’t shout too much about it, did they? Because if they did more than mention it in passing, like, it wouldn’t take a lot of working out to understand that if all you need for baby girls is a pair of X chromosomes from two different sources, you wouldn’t need men.’

      ‘You’re telling me that after twenty-five years of feminist theory, scientists have only just noticed that?’ I couldn’t keep the irony out of my voice.

      ‘No, they’ve always known it. But certain kinds of experiments are against the law. That includes almost anything involving human embryos. Unless, of course, it’s aimed at letting men who produce crap sperm make babies. So although loads of people knew that theoretically it was possible to make babies from two women, nobody could officially do any research on it, so the technology that would make it possible science instead of fantasy just wasn’t happening.’ The journalist was in control now, and Alexis paused for effect. She couldn’t help herself.

      ‘So what happened to change that?’ I asked, responding to my cue.

      ‘There was a load of research done which showed that men didn’t react well to having their wives inseminated with donor sperm. Surprise, surprise, they didn’t feel connected to the kids and more often than not, families were breaking up because the men didn’t feel like they were proper families. Given that more men are having problems with their sperm production than ever before, the pressure was really on for doctors to find a way of helping inadequate sperm to make babies. A couple of years ago, they came up with a really thin needle that could be inserted right into the very nucleus of an egg so that they could deliver a single sperm right to the place where it would count.’